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Jeff Stolowski bought this 1970 Oldsmobile 442 convertible sight unseen, trusting nothing but a friend’s description of an estate sale. Then he noticed a few factory options that did not add up, and after some digging discovered he owned the Number 1 Official Pace Car. Lou Costabile catches the whole story at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont. Watch to hear how a blind gamble turned into one of the show’s rarest finds.
A nicely restored 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 Fastback finished in Acapulco Blue, powered by the 351 Windsor’s 4-barrel 290-horsepower tune and backed by an FMX automatic. Ford built this V8 by stretching the familiar 302 rather than starting from scratch, yet it still outsold every bigger engine option in the Mach 1 lineup that year. See what made this particular fastback stand out among the more than 50,000 351-powered Mach 1s built for 1969.
This Fox body Mustang running high 9 second passes at a Street Car Takeover event started life built for a very different kind of high speed pursuit. Ford’s Special Service Package Mustangs were built for the California Highway Patrol and dozens of other agencies, reinforced from the frame up for real police duty. When those cars retired, their stiffened chassis and the massive 5.0 liter aftermarket turned them into some of the best cheap drag car donors around.
By 1973, emissions rules and insurance surcharges had killed off nearly every genuine muscle car, except the Pontiac Trans Am SD-455, whose factory horsepower rating was so conservative it hid nearly 100 real horsepower. Only 252 of these hand assembled engines were built that year, and stock examples still ran 13.9 second quarter miles. It is widely considered the last true high performance muscle car before a long performance drought set in.
Chevrolet’s Cameo pioneered something no pickup buyer had seen before, smooth fiberglass bed panels built by the same supplier making Corvette bodies, wrapped around available power steering, power brakes, and Hydra-Matic luxury. This 1957 example represents one of the rarest model years, with only a few thousand built before Chevy moved on. It is the truck that quietly invented the lifestyle pickup category still around today.
The Mercury Cyclone rarely gets mentioned alongside its more famous muscle car rivals, but its resume says otherwise, a Mustang sourced 289 V8, a 428 Cobra Jet option, and a genuine NASCAR winning pedigree that included a 1-2 finish at the 1968 Daytona 500. Only around 74,000 were built across nine years, making surviving examples like this one a rare sight anywhere, let alone on a scenic backroad drive.
Chevrolet’s Camaro became just the third car in history, and the first since 1955, to pace the Indianapolis 500 when it took the honor in 1967. Behind the glossy pace-car status was a stranger story: the actual race winner refused to be associated with the car at all. This 350-powered convertible carries the Festival Car designation, one of just over 100 built for VIPs during Indy’s month of May.
George Hansen spent fifty years chasing a car he first admired as a kid in a neighbor’s driveway — a 1962 Oldsmobile Starfire convertible named after a Cold War jet fighter. The Starfire also happened to introduce a feature now standard on nearly every performance car: the floor-mounted console shifter. Here’s the history behind the car that finally caught up with Hansen’s childhood memory.
This 1955 Chevrolet 210 wears the same sheet metal that made Chevrolet’s Tri-Five lineup famous, but almost nothing else about it is original. A GM Performance ZZ4 crate engine, a 700R4 overdrive transmission, and a Camaro-sourced rear suspension replace what Chevrolet actually offered buyers the first time around — and the gap between the two tells you exactly how far small-block performance has come since 1955.
Duck X Productions’ Lights Out 7 turned South Georgia Motorsports Park into a proving ground for radial-tire cars pushing well past 2,000 horsepower, and the wheelstands that resulted became the stuff of drag racing legend. From the physics of exactly when a front end lifts to the underdog racer who showed up without a running car and left with a five-figure purse, the story behind the chaos is stranger than the clips alone let on.
This Pearl White 1967 Pontiac Firebird convertible looks factory-fresh, but the Run Rite Classics team quietly rebuilt what lives under the skin. It’s a first-year Firebird with a 400 that now runs and handles better than it did new — with every modern upgrade hidden from view. Owner-restorer Chuck Woolery walks through the details at the World of Wheels show. Watch to see how a period-correct look hides modern muscle.
1974 was the final year Plymouth built a Cuda, closing out a nameplate that started exactly a decade earlier. This particular car skips the factory-spec 360 and instead runs a stroked 408 with a three-carb six-pack setup. Here is what it took to build the high-output Cuda that Detroit never actually offered.
Long before wheelie contests became a fixture at nostalgia drag meets, exhibition cars like the Little Red Wagon proved a vehicle could win over a crowd without ever putting all four wheels down. This wagon-versus-Nova wheels-up showdown carries that tradition forward, pitting two very different builds against each other in a battle of who can stay airborne longest. Which one takes the win might surprise you.
Five of Detroit’s wildest creations — a ’71 Barracuda, two Dodge Charger R/Ts, a ’69 Super Bee, and a ’69 Mustang Mach 1 — sit gathered in one place like a snapshot of the muscle era at its peak. Each one represents a different bet Detroit made when horsepower was king and restraint was optional. The obvious favorite isn’t necessarily the one that wins. Watch the lineup and pick your own.